Occupy Religion by Rieger Joerg;Pui-lan Kwok;

Author:Rieger, Joerg;Pui-lan, Kwok;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Immanence and Transcendence

According to conventional understandings, “immanence” refers to things that belong to this world and “transcendence” refers to things that go beyond it. The notion of transcendence is problematic for progressive thinkers because they seek to focus on the concerns of this world rather than on what is otherworldly. They are often suspicious of religion because they see it as concerned mostly with otherworldly transcendence. Postcolonial and cultural theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for instance, says theology is foreign to her thinking, and she is wary of religious talk, which is often undergirded by the dichotomy of nature and supernature.[28] Hardt and Negri have written explicitly against transcendence: “The multitude, today, however, resides on the imperial surfaces where there is no God the Father and no transcendence. . . . The multitude has no reason to look outside its own history and its own present productive power for the means necessary to lead toward its constitution as a political subject.”[29]

These thinkers’ suspicion of anything that smacks of transcendence is understandable, considering how transcendence has been domesticated and coopted by religions and theologies of the status quo, whether liberal or conservative. Conservative theologies’ teachings on creationism and intelligent design,[30] for instance, tend to identify transcendence with the way things are. This sort of transcendence frequently provides a sacred canopy protecting the hierarchies of power that sustain the status quo. But this happens even in liberal theologies, which seek to challenge the ways the conservative status quo has come to define religion. Liberal theologies’ emphasis on human experience, all the way back to Friedrich Schleiermacher, often identifies transcendence with the status quo as well, especially where it endorses the value systems of the modern world. This approach becomes especially problematic when the adoption of theories of evolution turns into a widespread social Darwinism, which identifies the “survival of the fittest” with the elites. Yet the insistence on immanence can also be coopted to celebrate the status quo, as seen in German Protestantism of the nineteenth century and contemporary civil religion in the United States. In these examples, God is perceived as embodied in the dominant expressions of culture, religion, politics, and economics. That is why megachurches are so fashionable: they are seen as the embodiment of God on earth. We need a different approach.

Instead of pitting immanence and transcendence against each other, let us take another look at the potential of each term for an emerging theology of the multitude. At the heart of a theology of the multitude is a deep sense that things do not have to be the way they are now. This sense links multitude theology to the various liberation theologies and distinguishes it from any other type of theological or religious reflection that works on the grounds of the way things are. Here we can find new experiences of transcendence and immanence that are in diametrical opposition to theologies of the status quo.

In the history of theology, the notion of transcendence has often played an important role in theologies of resistance.

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